ABC News Report: ISIS Shopping For Nukes

24 May 2015

Sunday’s broadcast of ABC’s “This Week” highlighted ISIS’s new claim that the Islamic terror group is growing financially so quickly it could buy its first nuclear weapon within a year.

ABC News’ Alex Marquardt reported, “This morning, ISIS is on a roll, scoring major land grabs in the past week. The group now estimated to control half of Syria, and taking the key Iraqi city of Ramadi,” he added, “In a new claim online, the jihadist group now says it has so much money it may soon be able to buy a nuclear weapon. A horrifying prospect that last year the president said would trigger the need for U.S. ground troops.”

When asked about ISIS getting nuclear weapons, the Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Rep Mac Thornberry (R-TX), said “Well, no evidence that it has happened. Would they do it if they had the opportunity? Of course. Would they use it if they had it? I don’t think there is any doubt. What do we do about it? Number one, we don’t wait until they get it before we take action that seriously degrades and destroys ISIS. Secondly, we keep pushing at their finances to lower the amount of money they have. But the other thing we’ve got to do is improve our intelligence capability. We, I think, know less today than we knew five, six years ago what terrorists around the world are doing, for a variety of reasons. But the key way to know what they’re doing, to prevent them from getting a nuclear, chemical, biological weapon, is to augment our intelligence capability and then, you’ve got to act. You can’t draw red lines you don’t follow up on.”